Arctic engineering in Greenland

Danish firm Munck Civil Engineering is carrying out the dredging required, with Arctic conditions ‘a particular challenge’.

Two airports are being built in the west of Greenland to accommodate larger aircraft as well as the propeller-driven aircraft that can land there now.

A new runway at one of the towns, Ililissat, is partly in the sea, so a thick layer of clay sediment has had to be removed from the seabed and then backfilled.

Using an HS 8200 duty cycle crawler crane from Liebherr, up to 1,000m³ of clay material was excavated each day, said construction manager Kevin van den Bos.

The 200t machine has a 35m boom and clamshell grab with 3.5m³ capacity.

Munck then had to source all the rock required for the new runway from within the project boundaries, which it did by drilling and blasting around 5.5 million cubic metres of rock.

That was transported to the construction section so the engineers could build a 2-kilometre long runway, which was edged with rocks using the crawler crane as part of the coastal protection it needed.

Arctic challenges

It wasn’t just the below-zero temperatures that created challenges – at 8 degrees C in summer that’s okay, but the work had to be done before they plummeted to minus 35.

“It is very important for us to complete the dredging work before the ice spreads in the bay and makes our work impossible,” the team said.

With just one ship a week bringing in supplies to the region, it was vital that the company had whatever equipment it might need to carry out repairs.